Uptime Kuma: Dead-Simple Homelab Monitoring Before You Touch Grafana

You will, eventually, have a service go down without noticing. The photo backup silently stops. The media server is dead when guests arrive. A container crashed on Tuesday and you find out Friday. The cloud providers you’re replacing had one thing you don’t yet: someone watching, all the time.

Uptime Kuma is that someone. It’s a self-hosted monitor that pings your services on a schedule and pokes you — on your phone, in Discord, wherever — the second something goes down. It takes about five minutes to set up, and it’s usually the very first monitoring tool people install, long before the heavier Prometheus-and-Grafana stack.

Install it in one command

Uptime Kuma is a single container. Give it a volume so your monitors and history survive restarts, and publish its port.

docker run -d \
--name uptime-kuma \
--restart=unless-stopped \
-p 3001:3001 \
-v uptime-kuma:/app/data \
louislam/uptime-kuma:2

Prefer Compose (recommended, so it lives alongside your other stacks)? Same thing, in a file:

services:
uptime-kuma:
  image: louislam/uptime-kuma:2
  container_name: uptime-kuma
  ports:
    - "3001:3001"
  volumes:
    - uptime-kuma:/app/data
  restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
uptime-kuma:

Bring it up (docker compose up -d) and open http://YOUR-HOST-IP:3001. The first screen creates your admin account. That’s the entire install — no config files.

Add your first monitors

Everything from here is point-and-click. Hit Add New Monitor and fill in a few fields.

A few monitors later, the dashboard starts earning its keep — every green segment is one successful check, and the moment anything fails you’ll see exactly when the run of green stops:

http://homelab.lan:3001/dashboard

Get notified before your users do

A dashboard you have to look at isn’t monitoring — it’s a screensaver. The real value is the alert. Go to Settings → Notifications → Setup Notification and pick a channel: Uptime Kuma supports Discord, Telegram, email (SMTP), Slack, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, and dozens more.

Bonus: a status page for the household

Uptime Kuma can publish a status page — a clean, shareable page showing which services are up. Make one for your family (“is the movie server working?”) so they can check for themselves instead of asking you. You choose exactly which monitors appear, and it can be public or kept private on your LAN.

Where it fits in the bigger picture

Uptime Kuma answers “is it up?” brilliantly and instantly. When you later want “why is it slow, and what’s the trend over three months?”, that’s the job of Grafana and Prometheus — deep metrics, not just up/down. The two are complementary, and most mature homelabs run both.

Add your new monitor to your Homepage dashboard (there’s a built-in Uptime Kuma widget), and you’ve got eyes on the whole lab. Back to the roadmap for the next step.

Related posts:

• Proxmox Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana — the deep-metrics layer that complements up/down checks
• Node Exporter + pve-exporter: Complete Proxmox Metrics — feed Grafana with host metrics
• Homepage Dashboard — surface Kuma status on your start page
• Tailscale Subnet Router — monitor and reach services remotely
• The Self-Healing Arr Stack — a real dead-man’s-switch push monitor in action
• One UPS, Whole Homelab: Safe Auto-Shutdown with NUT — watch the UPS and shut the lab down cleanly when the power fails
• The Docker localhost Trap: 24 Hours of Red, Zero Real Downtime — the #1 mistake to avoid when Kuma runs in Docker
• Real Screenshots, Zero Leaks: My Disposable Demo Lab — how this site photographs Kuma without exposing a real network
• Track AI Token Spend in Grafana: Claude, Codex, and Ollama — metrics-side monitoring for the AI stack, with alerts that don’t page on a sleeping laptop
• Homelab Capacity Planning: What If a Node Dies Tonight? — Kuma tells you a node died; this works out whether its containers fit anywhere else

Sources: Uptime Kuma (GitHub), Uptime Kuma wiki.